Why break the habit of a lifetime by reading it now?

Marcel Proust

For years now, my ‘holiday reading’ has comprised one book — Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time – and I see it staring at me as I write this in a London apartment. In between, the book changed its name, perhaps to trick me into reading it. When I bought my first copy it was known more poetically as Remembrances of Things Past. 

It is a most widely travelled unread book, having accompanied me on holidays and reporting assignments for nearly a quarter century now. As Groucho Marx said in another context, it is a wonderful book, and someday I intend to read it. But clearly it is putdownable. In fact I no longer see it as a book, but as a travel companion, something that gets into and out of the suitcase before anything else. Others travel with family pictures, I have my Proust. 

I have read commentaries on the book, other people’s battles with it, the philosophical implications of sitting in a cork-lined room and writing, and even a book that describes how Proust beat the scientists to the discovery of the manner in which memory fails. Yet the book itself sits on my shelf, mocking, challenging, provoking, tempting, like an ageing spinster who is on the verge of giving up hope but is putting in an effort all the same. 

Soon we celebrate the silver jubilee of our relationship and it would be a shame to break the habit of a lifetime by actually reading the book now. Perhaps I might write a book on not reading Proust. There are enough of the other kind anyway. If I read it now, I would miss an important comrade, and there may not be enough time to build such a long non-reading relationship with another book. 

Marcel’s brother once commented, “The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to read the book.” I don’t look forward to breaking my leg in the cause of literature. 

To be fair, some people have their Proust, others have their Joyce and a third lot their Dan Brown or Archie comics - reading they must catch up on, but never do. 

Proust, surprisingly enough, does not figure on any ‘holiday reading’ list so popular in our newspapers and magazines. I always wonder what these lists are about. Does holiday reading imply there is workday reading? Or books to be read while cycling or while wearing a kilt? There are lists of books to be read on the beach (what are they - waterproof and sandproof?), so I presume somebody somewhere is preparing a list of books to be read on the 89th floor of a building. Or the back of a bus. 

Proust is above all this. You carry it around for 25 years, and celebrate the intimacy by continuing to ignore it on your bookshelf. That is how the best relationships last - you don’t go in search of lost time.

(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)